Beege Welborn

Okay - so this has been a bit of a surprise to me and I guess because I never really thought about it. But France is the only country in the EU with nukes?

Well...yeah. The UK is the other. That's it.

Knock me over with feather.

So in the end Charles de Gaulle was right.

As president of France in the 1960s, it was he who launched the policy of French strategic independence.

Of course, he said, Americans were more our friends than Russians are. But the US too had interests. And one day their interests would clash with ours.

In the world of today, his warnings have never seemed more clairvoyant.

From his principle of superpower detachment, de Gaulle conjured the notion of France's sovereign nuclear deterrent – whose existence is now at the centre of debates over European security.

France and the UK are the only two countries on the European continent which have nuclear weapons. Currently France has just short of 300 nuclear warheads, which can be fired from France-based aircraft or from submarines.

The UK has about 250. The big difference is that the French arsenal is sovereign – i.e. developed entirely by France – whereas the UK relies on US technical input.